Doing dead time for the sovereign: Archive, abandonment, performance

Abstract

This essay explores the fabrication of the concepts of event and archive through the notion of dead time. It first unfolds this notion of dead time as a critical concern of the German film maker, Harun Farocki, in his video entitled, Ich glaubte Gefangenen zu sehen (I thought I saw prisoners 2001). It then locates the historical constitution of dead time in Jeremy Bentham's panopticon. I trace how Bentham linked dead time intimately with sovereignty and the archive. If historians and convicts are still doing dead time, as I propose they are, how can they together reimagine event and archive? The final section of the essay explores the possibility of performance as a way of thinking of an unsovereign history. It recounts the story of my participation with convicts of Mountjoy Prison, Dublin (a panoptical-style prison opened by the British in their Irish colony in 1851 and only recently closed by the Irish Government) in developing a public installation, entitled Cell, held in October 2004, during the dead time of evening lockdown.